


someone to sit in your chair

by arbitrarily



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Canon-Typical Content, M/M, Mid-Canon, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27938127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Lieutenant Elliott helps to solve one mystery and earns himself another. Or, three conversations between Lieutenant Elliott and Benoit Blanc.
Relationships: Benoit Blanc/Lieutenant Elliott (Knives Out)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 59
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	someone to sit in your chair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dissembler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/gifts).



> Title from Sondheim's "Being Alive," of which I like to think Benoit Blanc would approve. 
> 
> HAPPY YULETIDE, and I wish you a very happy holiday!

_ Before. _

He accepted his help, in part, because he wasn’t a fool. The other part had to do with the case itself. The death of Harlan Thrombey—each time Trooper Wagner said it, and he said it a lot, Lieutenant Elliott could picture the worn paperback copy that would accompany such a title.

Elliott knew from jump the kind of people they’d be dealing with on this one. All it took was one glance at that big, old, and frankly pretty ugly, house, and he knew. Fucking rich people. As if with all that cash, they couldn't go and buy themselves a little happiness if not grace.

It wasn’t just that though. Elliott liked to say he didn’t have any illusions, not back when he first joined police and not now. It was a job, and a decently paying one at that. Except, that part wasn’t entirely true: he did have some illusions, leftover from youth. Illusions informed by his great-auntie’s Hercule Poirots, _Perry Mason_ reruns on the TV, shit, even the Nancy Drews he stole off his sister when the two-week stretch of Christmas break hit intolerable boredom. He liked a mystery, and what he liked even more was solving one.

And if there was anyone who knew how to solve a mystery, it was Benoit Blanc.

So there he was, in his office with Wagner, when Blanc first came by. Wagner was starstruck as anything, that same barely suppressed glee as when Elliott had met him at the Thrombey house after the call came in. He even said the same thing he had said to Elliott then, in reply to Elliott’s sharp _thwap_ on the arm and the equally sharp, “Get it together, the dude’s dead."

Wagner said, “I’m so sorry, it’s just, I’m such a fan.”

“And it’s mighty kind of you to say,” Benoit Blanc, he of The Last of the Gentlemen Sleuth Motherfuckers, or whatever crown the media had bestowed upon him, said.

“Hey, Wagner. Why don’t you give us a second here, go fetch some coffee, maybe your autograph book.”

Wagner beamed, lending further credence to Elliott’s theory that for as eager and industrious as he was as an officer of the law, the man was entirely incapable of detecting sarcasm. “I will!”

He shut the door behind him, at the least, and then they were alone.

“Detective Lieutenant Elliott, I presume?”

Elliott lifted his eyebrows. “Haven’t disproved that reputation of yours yet.” He got to his feet and he extended his hand to Blanc over his desk to shake.

“Benoit Blanc,” Benoit Blanc said, unnecessarily.

“Oh, believe me, I know. That shit with the tennis pro, that was something else, man.”

Elliott resumed his seat behind his desk. He gestured towards the lone other chair in his office, orange and most like older than Elliott, beside Blanc. The office, his as it was, was cramped, the size of a forgotten file room or a janitor’s closet. If he had wanted—and, historically, he had—he could stretch both his arms out and if he leaned a little side-to-side he could touch either wall with his fingertips.

“Not to cut the chit-chat or nothing, least of all with a celebrity such as yourself, but that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. What brings you by, Benny Blanc?”

“Common interest, my soon-to-be amigo.”

“How’s that now?”

“Harlan Thrombey.” Elliott nearly regretted sending Trooper Wagner out. Had he heard the way that name came out of Benoit Blanc’s mouth, he would’ve shit. “My services have been retained to aid in the investigation of his unfortunate and grisly demise. Unofficially, of course.” His mouth twitched with amusement.

Elliott snorted. Now here was a man who must’ve run into his fair share of bureaucratic red tape. “I’m gonna assume you heard, but that’s case’s all but closed. Suicide.”

“So they say.”

It had been a long time on this job, cold and miserable New England winters, tightly-packed nights of redundant paperwork trapped in this tiny office, since Elliott felt that tripwire spring inside himself. He always thought of it as curiosity, but it was more than that. It was a hunger, of sorts. A desire for not just an answer, but the puzzle, the maze, to get to it first. It was the sort of romantic, idealized bullshit that made Chief get all red and blustery in the face, cheeks to match his gin blossom nose, and say, “This isn’t no Sherlock Holmes rigamarole, just get me the goddamn answers.”

“And what’s it you’re saying?”

Blanc shrugged, performative as anything. “I’m not saying nothing yet.”

Elliott rocked back in his chair; it squeaked in protest. He picked a pen up off his desk. “Foul play, huh?”

“Worthy of our consideration, I should think.”

“You talk to the chief? About working the case?”

The grimace on his face said he had. “That is a man who does not care for me an iota.”

“Yeah, join the club. It’s not personal-like. He’s got love for one man and one man only, and that’s Tom Brady.”

“Not an entirely useful affection, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t mind shit.” Elliott flicked his pen, grasped now between his fingers. Somewhere, underneath all that paperwork, was the Harlan Thrombey file. He'd been all but ready to write that one off. Bloody, messy, ugly, but that was suicide. The unorthodox method for it, well, that was a mystery writer for you. It wasn’t that Elliott had a lack of imagination, it was just that he was busy. “He's gonna be cool, you playing ride along with us?”

“So long as I do not impersonate an officer of the law, your superior told me I am free, and I quote, to fuck about any which way so long as it wasn’t in his presence.”

Elliott leaned forward, his forearms braced against the edge of the desk. “So what you’re saying is, you’re my problem now.”

“You’re a glass half-empty sort of fellow, aren’t you?” Blanc smiled, and it was a funny thing to witness. His entire face lifted with it, bright and privately entertained. That wasn’t to say he was dour without it—there was a persistent gleam in his eye, like he was sitting on the punchline to the dirtiest joke you were ever gonna hear.

“Benny, I’m whatever gets the job done.”

“Then lucky for you that I’ve come around.” The smile remained. “Now, go on then. Get me up to speed.”

And that, more or less, was that. The beginning of a beautiful friendship, as both Humphrey Bogart and Trooper Wagner would say.

_ During. _

“The hornet’s nest, my friend—it has been stirred.”

“Understatement, I’m thinking.”

They were back in Elliott’s office, the minimal space dark, only a small desk lamp lit. A quiet unlike anything they’d been able to achieve out at Chez Thrombey. Elliott had always liked the precinct after hours. It was a good place to think. The way Blanc was pacing in front of his desk (five steps forward, turn, five steps back), he was inclined to believe he agreed. He was currently unselfconsciously absorbed in his own thoughts, comfortable enough with Elliott watching him as he ping-ponged from one side of the room to the other, his face resolute and serious in a way that rendered him dangerously intelligent. Like a bird of prey, Elliott thought. Before the swoop down, talons at the ready.

Eliott lacked Blanc’s patience. He shifted in his desk chair, which gave out a sharp squawk as its basic structural integrity was tested under his weight. He sighed. “You really think any of those people we talked to today might’ve done this?” Elliott’s voice said, beyond those words: _because_ _I sincerely doubt it_.

Blanc paused his pacing. He braced his hands on his hips and shifted his attention to Elliott.

“Now, Lieutenant Elliott, if I have learned anything in my time, and I like to think I have, it’s that people? They are capable of just about anything.”

Elliott arched an eyebrow. “You think I don’t already know that after ten years of police?”

Blanc ignored him. He sighed himself and then took a seat in that ugly orange chair. “You kept the case open and I rightly appreciate that.”

Elliott scoffed. “Shit, Benny, maybe I just wanted to see what you could do, full-throttle, on the open road. Maybe I wanted to live out that one, what was it, stock car driver arson case of yours.”

Blanc’s face lifted, less, Elliott thought, on account of that case and more that Elliott had done his homework. “Poor fellow, no brakes.”

Elliott tapped his finger against the Thrombey file, grown twice in heft since Blanc’s arrival. “Now, I know what you’ve been saying, foul play this, foul play that, nest of vipers he got for kin and all, but, Benny. I’ve been looking this over, forwards and back, and that knife wound? The angle, the blood splatter, the scene itself—it’s self-inflicted. He did it to himself, man.”

Blanc crossed his legs at the knee. He reclined back with a relaxed comfort Elliott had previously thought impossible in such a chair. “And in that regard, we do not disagree.”

Elliott’s brow creased. “But?”

“But,” and Blanc launched himself forward. The both of them were bent over on either side of the desk, the file set between them along with a scant few inches separating their faces. “But, you’re only looking at the one side! It’s not a—not a sheet of paper, with writing on the one side and maybe on the other. This is origami, Lieutenant. Multi-sided, many-faceted, delicate. Complicated as all hell.”

For whatever reason—and if he was willing to investigate inside himself he’d likely find plenty to choose from—Elliott found he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Blanc’s face was well-lined and friendly, but it was also expectant, eager for Elliott to join him in whatever unspoken understanding he had already reached in this case. Elliott didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to do that—where the average man walked a path through a dark wood, Blanc leapt over streams and swung from trees and baffled the common sense of such otherwise immutable forces like gravity or speed.

Elliott moved first He crossed his arms over his chest as he settled back in his creaking chair. Blanc cocked his head, like punctuation to a leading question mid-interrogation. Elliott lifted his hand and ran it over his mouth.

“What d’you make of the nurse?” he finally said.

The corners of Blanc’s mouth raised as he smiled without parting his lips. “Marta Cabrera,” he said slowly. There was a canny look on Blanc’s face, but then, he was always canny. The more Elliott got to know him, the more he saw of him, the more he hated that _New Yorker_ piece and every other bit of print about him he had dug up during last night’s Google search. Sprawled in bed, his bedroom lit only by the glow of his phone, biting down on each yawn that tried to spring from him as he clicked and scrolled, read and read. As he took him from just a man and made him into something else to be solved. They all missed the mark. Elliott couldn’t decide how much of that was up to bad writing or bad investigative journalism and how much was simply that Benoit Blanc was a difficult subject to pin down, least of all in writing.

“Like I said to her,” Blanc was saying, “she has a good heart.”

“But?”

Blanc shrugged. “Origami.”

He met his eye and held it. He’d never once met anybody he’d worked with where he felt he could have an entire conversation without saying a word. Enter Benoit Blanc. The corners of Blanc's eyes crinkled, and even though his mouth hadn’t moved, Elliott was more than inclined to say he was grinning again. Like he knew Elliott’s thoughts even as they came to him. Should’ve been more uncomfortable than it was, maybe even unwanted. It wasn’t. Instead, he told himself, seeing as they were working together for a common goal, it was very nearly nice. Like with this shit, maybe you didn’t have to go it alone. Or at least that was how he chose to justify it.

“That girl pukes again, I tell you.”

Blanc’s grin deepened. “Hmm. Damnably useful though.”

Blanc slapped his hand down onto the desk and levered himself up to his feet. He grinned down at Elliott. “Let’s see how well we can unfold this, tomorrow morning. Once more into the breach, our young nurse and her heart of gold, serving as our intrepid guide.” He paused at the door, still closed before him. “I want a clear mind tomorrow, Lieutenant. Get your rest. Don’t stay up so late, reading up on little ol’ me.”

Elliott would put money on it—even in the dim lighting, he’d swear that Blanc had winked.

_After_.

He took down the last of Marta’s statement. “That,” he said, his pen rushing over the page, “about,” his handwriting had gone nearly unreadable, “does it.”

Marta nodded, relief obvious in every single thing about her. She even smiled a little different, without all that weight on her. “Thank you,” she said.

“Nah, thank you. Without you and Benny, well. Who knows where we might be.”

She cupped both her hands around her mug as she lifted it to her mouth. Her mouth curved up behind the rim. “You and Mr. Blanc, you’re old friends?”

Elliott laughed, more out of surprise than anything else. “Nope. No, ma’am. We only just met.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “You two, you behave like old friends.”

He held both his hands up and open. “Nothing up my sleeve, and not a word of a lie.”

“Well. Then you make a good team.”

“I’ll be sure to tell not only my boss that but Benoit Blanc himself. And, in the meantime, I’ll leave you to get settled in your new digs.” He rose, and gave her his hand to shake.

As he turned, he was met with Blanc, lingering in the doorway. As he had been, for the last several minutes, a fact Elliott had been all-too aware of. He might not have been inducted into the sleuth hall of fame like some people in the vicinity, but he was still a damn good, and observant, detective. That, and a pair of eyes like that on you—well, damn. You felt it.

“All yours, Benny.”

He patted him on the shoulder as he stepped past. Blanc stilled him with a hand curled into the crook of his elbow. Blanc leaned towards him; Elliott might have leaned, too.

“Wait to give me a ride back, would you?”

He felt more than a touch caught off balance—a habit, it seemed, these past couple days in his company—but Elliott nodded all the same. He resisted the urge for the backwards glance, focused instead on clearing out the place. He sent Trooper Wagner on ahead, along with the uniforms dispatched after Ransom was collared. And then he sat behind the wheel and he waited. He waited until he was the only one left, parked out front of the late Harlan Thrombey’s home. Marta Cabrera’s house now. Christ, what a day. What a case.

He had heard the crunch of gravel, so the opening of the passenger side door wasn’t entirely unexpected. The rush of cold air was, and Elliott bundled his coat tighter around himself. Blanc threw himself down in the seat beside him and quickly shut the door.

“Christ, but it is chilly up in these parts, Turn up that heat, would you?” Blanc rubbed his hands together, his collar pulled up along his jaw. The dome light overhead dimmed. “And as a final request, if you might be so willing to oblige, escort me, please, to your grimiest establishment. I am in dire need of a drink or several.”

Elliott chuckled as he turned the key in the ignition. “Sure thing, Benny.”

He did exactly that, and now, they were each on drink number two-and-a-half, down to their rolled shirtsleeves in the humid heat of the bar. Even though it was only early November, the place was decorated for Christmas. Though, if memory served—and memory was something this place worked hard to deplete if their two-for-one Long Island Iced Tea special had anything to say for it—that might have been a year-round interior design choice.

“You haven’t got yourself a partner,” Blanc said. Much as he made most observations, this one was both abrupt and entirely, obviously, predictable (albeit, in hindsight) in competing measure. Elliott still didn’t get how he did it, more magician than investigator, the way he worked through both evidence and people.

Elliott took a longer pull from his beer. Sam Adams Winter Lager, the only thing on tap here. Each sip Benny took, he made a face as if deeply betrayed. Didn’t stop him from drinking it though. He’d expected Benny’s accent to deepen as he drank, but instead—and here was yet another element of the unforeseen about him—it softened. Became that much less noticeable. Or, maybe, that was on Elliott: he was growing to know him, he was becoming familiar to him. It was Elliott who was making him softer.

Elliott cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Bad luck, you could say. Gone through the three already.” Each of the three had been lost to an IA investigation Elliott may or may not have incited, a heart attack followed by a quadruple bypass with a side of permanent desk duty, and a change of heart via a newfound career via sale of crochet crafts on Etsy, respectively. He didn’t go into all that with Benny, though based on the eager look cresting over his face, he wouldn’t have minded hearing about it.

He pointed at Elliott. “I was gonna say lone wolf.”

Elliott inhaled, like the start of a laugh. “Takes one to know one, huh?”

Benny pursed his lips, very near to disappointed disapproval. “That what you think of me?”

“Hell, Benny, it's not a judgment. Besides, you’d have to give a man more than a couple days to unravel all your mysteries.” He meant it as he said it, but again, he found himself arrested by the startling contradiction that was Benoit Blanc. There was so much about him that shouldn’t make any kind of sense, yet at the same time, much as Marta had assumed about the both of them, he felt as if he’d known him for a good long while. And wasn’t that goddamn strange—to feel like you knew somebody when it had only been a matter of days. He didn’t know if that was a testament to Benny’s charm or something more sincere. He knew which one he hoped it was.

“Is that what you’d like?” Benny said.

Elliott resisted the urge to squirm on his side of the booth, but only just. If he’d ever needed a deterrent against murder or any other capital offense, well, here it was: placed in the hot seat with Benoit Blanc, his attention fixed, questions aimed, with him in the crosshairs. It was unnerving as hell.

“Well, shit. Way to put a man on the spot.”

For a moment, they waited each other out. Neon lights advertising Budweiser and an old television screen mounted above glowed over them. The light caught the hanging tinsel and it glinted, as did the mocking rosy-cheeked Santa over Benny’s shoulder. It was cozy, in its own ugly way.

Benny played it both straight and crooked, as Elliott had already learned was his way. He colored his words with humor even as he meant each word he said. He gave you an out that was only going to lead you back to both the truth. And, to him.

“Take your time,” Benny said. “You'll find I’m a patient man, Lieutenant Elliott, and I am more than happy to give you some of my own—time, that is, and patience as well, I suppose.” The expression on his face shifted, just a little and just enough. Dirty and appealing and something new to sort and solve.

Benny leaned forward, his voice pitched that much lower, quieter. “And if it’s more that you’re wanting from me, well, then, aren’t you in luck? I am quite the generous man.” Knowing, expectant, confident and fucking confounding—he grinned. Elliott did, too. 


End file.
